Welcome to our
newest edition of our periodic feature Upfront Mini Bytes. In Upfront Mini Bytes we provide eight tasty
bits of genealogy news that will help give you a deeper byte into your family
history research. Each item is short and sweet. We encourage you to check
out the links to articles, blog posts, resources, and anything genealogical!

We hope you found
the past editions helpful. Use your
favorite search engine with “Upfront with NGS” “Mini Bytes” or use this Google search link.

Do you have
questions, suggestions for future posts, or comments? Please post a comment or send an e-mail to UpFront@ngsgenealogy.org.

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The Adoption History Project has a neat online archive. Many in our family history community are
adopted or are researching adoptions involving ancestors. It has subsections labeled: Timeline, People &
Organizations, Adoption Studies/Science, Topics in Adoption History, Further Reading,
and Document Archives. There is a lot of
helpful material here, especially when you are seeking historical context.

2010 Census - Tribal Tract Reference Maps areavailable from the US Census Bureau.
These give you a very detailed perspective on tribal census tracts and tribal
block groups as delineated to support 2010 Census data dissemination. The maps
also show the boundaries and names of American Indian reservations,
off-reservation trust lands (ORTLs), Alaska Native areas, Hawaiian home lands,
states, counties, county subdivisions, places, and much more. A great resource to match against historic
maps and visualize how reservations have changed through time.

If you are doing
French genealogy, be aware of some Linguistic Oddities. “Beyond the study of name-mangling
in parish and civil registrations is the issue of odd terminology ... Reading
civil and parish registrations is repetitious work and just as we begin to doze
off, invariably, an odd term will snap us awake, even make us laugh. But these
terms can be baffling as well, so today we give a mini-lexicon.”

Appreciating where surnames might be found can often help us advance our
genealogy research. One tool that might
help you is PublicProfiler Worldnames. At
this site, you enter your surname (or the one that interests you) and run a search to determine the world-wide distribution of the name. Do know that you need to enter an email address and indicate gender to get started. The coverage is North American, Europe, the UK, India,
China, Australia, New
Zealand, and Argentina. The map shown is for
Barna which fits my ancestor’s migration from Galicia
(Poland near the borders
with the Ukraine and Slovakia (previously Kingdom of Hungary).

Trove is a wonderful collection of digitized
Australian newspapers. It includes
National, Regional, and State newspapers.
As of earlier this week there were 13,683,606 pages consisting of 131,943,198 articles available to search, covering from 1803
to 2007. Learn more about the Australian Newspaper Digitsation Program.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to everyone that responded to the
Upfront Mini Bytes survey. Based on your
feedback, this feature will continue with the same format and frequency.

NGS does not
imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this
blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not
necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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